If you’ve wandered onto social media in the last week, chances are good that an algorithm seemingly designed to reward snuff films served you a video of a gruesome killing. Among the clips is footage of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska being brutally, fatally stabbed on the Charlotte Light Rail by Decarlos Brown Jr., who faces both a first-degree murder charge as well as a federal charge for committing an act of death on a mass transit system.
Over the past few days, the right has sought to capitalize on Zarutska’s horrific murder, arguing that Democratically controlled cities are hotbeds of violence and lawlessness and using it as further evidence of the wisdom of the Trump administration’s decision to dispatch National Guard troops to Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Chicago, and Boston in the name of law and order. In the case of the murder in Charlotte, the right has zeroed on a particular target: public transit. “The problem is a lot of people, unlike the rich liberals, they can’t ride Uber, they don’t have a vehicle, they have to take public transportation, and public transportation has become an epidemic of violence and homelessness across the country,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told Fox News’s Sean Hannity. Those same liberals, Duffy said, “hate cars” and “want us all to ride public transportation.”
Duffy’s argument isn’t subtle: Use mass transit, and you’ll get yourself killed. There’s just one problem: He couldn’t be more wrong. According to one recent study, car travel is 10 times as deadly as travel by mass transit. Another report from the nonprofit National Safety Council finds that, for every 100 million miles travelled by passengers, rates of car deaths were 17 times greater than deaths from train travel, and 50 times greater than deaths from bus travel. The United States boasts a road-traffic fatality rate higher than that of any other high-income country. According to data collected by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 8,055 people died in car crashes in the first three months of 2025. While those numbers have fallen since spiking dramatically in 2020 and 2021, longer-term trends show a troubling and longer-term rise. Between 2013 and 2023, road deaths in the United States increased by nearly 25 percent. Pedestrian traffic fatalities rose by a whopping 56 percent between 2013 and 2022, per the International Transport Forum’s 2024 Annual Road Safety Report.
The dangers aren’t confined to crashes. Roadway crime, such as car theft and road rage-related violence, is also far more prevalent than crimes committed on public transit. As transportation researcher Todd Litman recently pointed out, mass transit is the setting for a tiny proportion of serious crimes committed: “About 1 in 1,000 murders and 1 in 10,000 reported rapes take place in transit stations or vehicles across the US,” Litman wrote. “Travel by car exposes drivers and passengers to a wider range of criminal threats, including vehicle homicide, road rage and carjacking attacks, and robberies and assaults in parking lots, plus vehicle thefts and vandalism.”
Although local news outlets regularly report on deadly car crashes, comparatively rare deaths on public transit inspire specific kinds of terror. Security cameras capture chilling footage of outlandish violence, and bystanders recall blood-curdling sights of people being pushed onto train tracks by strangers. The thousands killed each year in car accidents, meanwhile, mostly die in private. The more public, personalized nature of deaths on mass transit may help explain why they’re so useful to Republicans who want to fearmonger about crime. But it’s not only that. Mass transit is a public good, and the GOP loves to undermine anything that uses local, state, and federal funds to help average people.
That’s not to suggest that all is well in the country’s mass transit networks, which remain grossly underfunded. But the mountains of evidence on how much safer it is to travel on a public train or a bus than in a private car should cast serious doubt on the stories told by opportunists like Duffy. Ginning up a moral panic over public transportation is a thinly veiled pretext to starve it of the resources that could make it even safer.
